Is philosophy useless?

Not OP, but why not study exclusively Ethics then?

The very question of what does it mean for something to be useful already poses a philosophical inquiry OP. It is not about whether or not you should do philosophy, but at what level. Because philosophy is already what you do lying in bed at night wondering why do anything at all or what does certain acts and concepts mean for you and others around you. Whenever you wonder if it's right/wrong to do something, wonder if it's better lying to someone in order to protect them/yourself, think about how some public policy is fair/unfair, etc. you're already "using" philosophy insofar as you're engaging in matters philosophers ask themselves about and provide answers to great length.

In a way, you might even actually claim philosophy cannot be useful, because it precedes and even concerns itself with defining usefulness to begin with. "Why philosophy?" means as much, and can be conflated with, "Why live", at least as far as our modern society is concerned. You and everyone else are free (and somewhat stimulated by a section of the elites) to refuse diving into the underlying meaning of things (beyond their immediate usefulness) but there is no choice about being affected by these underlying concepts and patterns.

It's not entirely useless it can give a clue as to how you want to live your life but anything other than surface understanding is completely useless. Unless you want to be a worthless philosophy lecturer/academic.
Asking philosophy majors to give you an honest answer is like asking the timeshare seller if it's REALLY worth it to buy the timeshare.

>Is philosophy, which examines the very structure of various value systems, useless from a specific narrow-minded, unexamined utilitarian point of view that the dumbest most unimaginative and uneducated type of people tend to ascribe to?

Recognize that there are various different value systems in the world other than the one that your immediate culture tells you. Maybe if you read philosophy you would understand this. Some people find so-called "use" in the pursuit of knowledge and of the understanding of truth, which philosophy seeks to achieve.

After the 18th century, specially after Hegel, everyone became caught up on studying philosophy from a "historical method" framework, I assume due to the same thing happening to the sciences at the time (e.g a physicist from any field is basically trying to infer future properties and configurations of a system from knowledge of the system at past times or past configurations, and circa that century we invented Lagrangian methods and such to do this practically "automatically"). It's not that there are no advances, but they are incremental and heavily based on being continuous from previous installments rather than disruptive. Baudrillard would be a good example, his analysis would not fit any previous historical time yet it is immensely influenced by past philosophers.

The only worthwhile pursuit in philosophy is the insurmountable task of logically refuting radical skepticism, else philosophy and every other concept is useless on the grounds that "use" does not exist.

Everything is always useful, but it might not seem valid to prioritize them.

Thank you all, this is exactly what I needed.

Some really insightful posts here
>really made me think

You've sparked my interest of philosophy once more!

I spent 6 hours a day reading Aristotle's main works one summer in undergrad. Ever since then, everything has been far easier to read and I can more easily grasp abstract concepts. Plato did nothing for me, though.

Philosophy isn't useless, It's a giant money making pyramid scheme for colleges, how is that useless?

Someone needs to add to the pic:
Parmenides
Averroes
Ockham
Dante
Erasmus of Rotterdam
Hamann
Vico
Voltaire
Fichte
Schelling
Stirner
John Henry Newman
Whitehead
Trotsky
Laruelle
Also remove half the list fuck's sakes.

I forgot Pascal, Plotinus, Camus and Frege.

"Do whatever makes you happy" pretty much means "do whatever feels good" today. Ascribing to this way of thinking will only make you complacent, and not realize and live up to your full potential as a human being. This kind of hedonist pop philosophy is why there are so many degenerates today. Western civilization is falling apart at the seams while kebab is taking over. The key difference between us and them is our society as a whole lacks conviction while theirs do not.

How to into conviction based philosophy?

cut the last line and it's almost accurate.

Read the Bible.

Philosophy is exactly what it means: the love of wisdom. The use of philosophy is to get wiser. It should be considered and extending courting of sweet, sweet Sophia.

Philosophy today is about cultivating an analytic mind which is useful because it allows one to make human scale sense of the data glut amassing and spilling out of every digital orifice.

It completely depends on the kind of philosophy. It also completely depends on what you think is useful - itself a philosophical question.

These all look like the exact same post or variations of the same post when you look at them as a block

>Why philosophy
Because philosophy has birthed numerous important subjects and continues to this day to aid in the development of other subjects (linguistics: mathematics, economics, psychologyn and neuroscience being some of the more notable fields advanced by philosophy in the last one hundred years).
The question of understanding how people should lives their lives, which is the single most important question to every human, is the sole domain of philosophy.
It is also for a great many people a very interesting subject in and of itself.

>why even read philosophy? He now knows philosophical works, then what?
This could be said of absolutely every single possible human activity. It doesn't mean anything. Why learn languages? Why go yachting? Why get out of bed in the morning instead of wallowing in your own filth until you die of starvation?

>Well do anyone really advance philosophy anymore?
This sentiment has always baffled me. Either you know about 20th century philosophy and then you know that this proposition to be false, or you don't know about 20th century philosophy but for some reason make enormous assumptions about it in spite of not knowing very much about it.

>20th century
I think he means 21st century.

>Well do anyone really advance philosophy anymore?
You've been browsing to much Veeky Forums, what gets discussed here (continental) isn't academic philosophy, which is analytical, and plenty of advancement goes on there.

but we are only 17 years into it. All things happening in philosophy right now haven't trickled down into the public. The only way to be aware of them is to either be studying philosophy academically or to subscribe to a range of journals.

You've got a very fairy-tail idea of philosophy, very few people in academic philosophy are subscribed to journals or reads contemporary philosophy, unless your writing radical reimaginations of Hegel or Nietzsche the likelihood your published paper never gets read by anybody but yourself is extremely high.

Where are Averroes and Rambam?

Have you ever heard of Aristotle? Socrates? Plato?

Morons!

>very few people in academic philosophy are subscribed to journals
Maybe it's because if you are in academia you don't have to subscribe to those journals because you have access to their contents for free.

>or reads contemporary philosophy
This is an amazingly outrageous statement. Sure, you can be a philosopher who is only interested in old philosophers or wants to use old philosophers to understand certain questions but to pretend that no philosopher reads works by other modern philosophers is the most baffling thing I have heard in awhile.
Do you seriously think that no one has read quine, that there is not a single published paper where someone responds to him in some way? What about Singer, Rawls or MacIntyre. All of these philosophers were responding to their peers based on the inherited knowledge of the entire history of the field.
I hate to do this on Veeky Forums but please provide some evidence for such an enormous claim.

>the likelihood your published paper never gets read by anybody but yourself is extremely high
If we take mathematics as en example if we imagine a paper attempting to advance upon an idea or to do something novel the level of technical skill required to even understand the question let alone the answer would be so advanced and have required so much previous knowledge that only people extremely familiar with the subject are going to understand what is happening. This necessarily means that an audience for these sorts of papers is extremely small and mostly made up of other academics who publish in the same field. This is normal for pretty much all academia.
Also these journals aren't cheap and it's not like subscribing to one gets to access to other ones. It would be an expensive hobby for anyone to try to follow multiple ones.

Ethics are part of Philosophy. If that's what you interesting in why don't study it? No reason to disqualify the discipline just because you are not interested in all its parts.

Any scholarly pursuit is near-useless in itself. Apply it and suddenly you become hot shit. Now go do something useful.

Philosophy is learning how to die.